Alfred the Great

Michael Wood on Alfred the Great, King of Wessex and king of the Anglo-Saxons. Michael Wood chronicles Alfred's achievements: his writings; his reflections on kingship; his military skill; his rejuvenation of education and his legal expertise. Here are Alfred's own words about kingship. 'What I set out to do was to virtuously and justly administer the authority given to me. And I wanted to do it - so my talents and capacity might be remembered. But every natural gift in us soon withers if it is not ruled by wisdom. Without wisdom no talent can be fully realised: for to do something unwisely can hardly be accounted a skill. To be brief, I may say that it has always been my wish to live honourably, and after my death to leave to my descendents my memory in good works.' Producer: Sarah Taylor.

from The Essay https://bbc.in/2Q9T9SR

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How a Guy With a Camera Outsmarted the United States

On the morning of December 26, Alan Meloy stood on the front porch of his home in northern England and noticed that “murky” early clouds were clearing into a crisp and sunny winter’s day.

Meloy, a retired IT professional and a plane spotter of 45 years, decided to grab his best camera to see whether he could catch any interesting flyovers. Before long, he saw a “jumbo”—a Boeing VC-25A—and, knowing there were few such aircraft left, took about 20 photos of the plane. He could tell immediately that there was something unusual about it, though.

“It was just so shiny,” he told me. As it turned out, Meloy had unwittingly captured Air Force One.

Meloy’s photo, which he uploaded to the image-sharing service Flickr, provided the confirmation a group of hobbyists needed to outwit the security precautions of the world’s largest superpower transporting its leader on a secret trip to a conflict zone. In effect, President Donald Trump’s visit to a U.S. military base in Iraq the day after Christmas was publicly known among a band of enthusiasts even before he landed in the country.

[Read: The president is visiting troops in Iraq. To what end?]

The incident is just the latest in a long line in which hobbyists, hackers, or armchair internet detectives have outwitted or thwarted the best intentions of governments, secret services, and militaries, a reminder of how the connected world opens all of them to new, evolving threats—and how unprepared even the world’s most advanced governments are to deal with the simplest of these threats.

Trump is not the first world leader to run into such issues. Britain has faced its own set of headaches with the tracking of planes.

Last year, when Prime Minister Theresa May traveled to meet the newly inaugurated U.S. president, a journalist noticed that her plane was being tracked online. At the time, Jim Waterson, then the politics editor at BuzzFeed’s British operation, tweeted that the Royal Air Force refueling craft that doubles as May’s executive transport plane could be tracked on FlightRadar and similar flight-tracking websites. “No one on the trip raised a complaint when I tweeted this,” said Waterson, now at The Guardian. Weeks later, though, The Mail on Sunday, a British newspaper, claimed that the fact that the plane could be tracked left open the possibility of, as Waterson described it, “terrorists potentially—with the emphasis on potentially—being able to use this information to shoot the prime minister out of the sky.” May’s plane is now no longer trackable on most consumer websites.

Still more embarrassment for the British government came in the form of another Mail on Sunday story, this time noting that a U.K. spy plane, reportedly flying a U.S.-U.K. operation scouting Russia’s air defenses, was also trackable by plane-spotting apps.

Regardless of who is aboard a plane, stopping people from tracking its location is not entirely straightforward: Crossing crowded airspace over multiple countries requires a transponder to be sending information on the aircraft’s location, call sign, and similar details (Air Force One’s disguised call sign on Trump’s Iraq trip, for the record, was RCH358). That does mean that in the new, far more connected online world, there will always be a form of risk.

[Read: How Twitter is changing modern warfare]

Plane spotters such as Meloy have been watching out for aircraft for decades, but as David Cenciotti, a respected aviation blogger, notes, new technical tools at their disposal, along with the near-instantaneous communications afforded by the internet, have changed the dynamic. “You are crowdsourcing something that 20 years ago would require weeks of investigations and letters exchanged with other geeks,” Cenciotti told me.

In other words, whereas once Meloy’s photo might have been an item of curiosity in a plane-spotting magazine a month after the fact, it now allows the president’s plane to be tracked in real time.

In fact, Cenciotti noted, military aircraft are fitted with the same transponders as civilian ones, and on occasion the operators of the military aircraft have forgotten to turn off the transponders during operations—including in Syria. This has been flagged as a real “operations security risk” in a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, increasing the risk of warning an adversary of an impending strike or even of allowing an attack to be intercepted. In the case of Air Force One this past week, Cenciotti said that because it was traveling through multiple countries’ airspace, it could not simply turn off its transponder (though he suggested it could have flown a different route or, to make sighting it harder for plane spotters, flown at night).

Planes are just the most obvious area in which the worlds of government and security services connect with civilians and hobbyists in potentially dangerous ways. Another is the world of cybersecurity, where nation-states, criminal hackers, and enthusiasts can interact.

Take the hack that became known as WannaCry: Exploits and hacking tools discovered by the National Security Agency were stolen and posted online. Several of these tools were modified into a devastating ransomware attack, which effectively held a computer hostage unless the victim paid a ransom. That particular attack began in Ukraine, but soon spread much farther, infecting, among others, Britain’s National Health Service, where it did more than $100 million worth of damage. And then, once in the wild, it was modified for commercial purposes by criminal hackers and used to extort still more victims.

These are hardly isolated examples, and it’s not only Western countries that have found themselves on the wrong end of such efforts: The open-source intelligence outlet Bellingcat has built its entire website on the basis of using openly available information to expose truths and counter misinformation, including using mapping information and satellite imagery to get to the bottom of attacks in both Ukraine and Syria.

The era of spy versus spy—if it ever truly existed—has certainly been ended by the internet. Today it is spy versus tweeter, plane spotter, criminal, activist, journalist, bored teenage hacker, and who knows who else. Many will intend no harm, and most breaches, such as the revelation of President Trump’s flight, will prove harmless.

But neither good intentions nor the fact that most breaches end up being inconsequential matters. The risks are real, and the signs don’t suggest that even the world’s largest superpower is ready to take the issue seriously, not least because it can’t seem to resolve even the simplest of problems: making the president’s plane hard to track.

from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2CEgUik

Finding a Way Through an Unspeakable Loss

I can’t write this story. I must write this story. My brain can’t process this story, though this story has been my brain’s main occupant since the morning of December 14th, when I heard the news.

Where to begin? With the accident itself? With the sludge of hours and days that followed? With the snow, the patch of ice, the oncoming headlights, none of which I saw in real life but all of which I now see at least once a day, in painful slow motion?

No, let’s back it up further. Way back, to the beginning, when my colleague Roberta walked into my office in Rockefeller Center and said, “I have a friend I think you should meet. She’s due right around the time you are. You guys can hang out on maternity leave!” This was 1995, when I was pregnant with my first child. We had no cellphones, no email. Just phone numbers stored in Filofaxes or in our head. “Here,” said Roberta, handing me a scrap of paper with the word Suzi on it followed by a phone number.

I feigned interest. Why would I want to hang out with a friend of a friend, just because our babies were due within weeks of each other? I smiled at Roberta and thanked her. The minute she walked out of my office, I threw the scrap away. I was busy, trying to tie up loose ends before my baby was born.

Jacob arrived two weeks early. Suzi’s baby, Madeline, hit her due date precisely. Or so I heard from Roberta, who would not be dissuaded by our lack of interest in meeting each other. A few weeks after Maddy was born, Roberta invited Suzi and me and our newborn infants to her apartment for brunch.

Suzi and I hit it off immediately, after she told me she’d tossed my number in the trash as well, and we spent not only most of our maternity leaves together, but the next 23 years. We started a music playgroup for our kids, because who wants to pay to have someone else sing “Baby Beluga” to a baby? If you know C, D, G, E minor, A, and D7, you can pretty much play any baby song ever written.

For five years, playgroup took place every Monday after work in the basement playroom of my building. After playgroup, Suzi, her husband, Franklin, Maddy, and eventually Maddy’s baby brother, Alex, would come upstairs to my apartment, where I would make us all dinner. Nothing fancy, just kid fare: mac and cheese, chicken, and one time linguine with shrimp, to the delight of Maddy, who liked to wander into the kitchen, compliment my bland cooking, and ask questions. Lots of them.

Why was the kitchen floor, in the summer, too hot for bare feet? (Because our first-floor kitchen was above a parking garage, which would overheat every July.) Could she take out the watercolors and paint? (Yes. Of course.) Could you use a toaster oven to cook chicken? (Theoretically, yes. Let’s try it and see.) Where was my husband? (At work.) But you work, and you’re here. Why? (It’s complicated, sweetheart. When you’re old enough, we’ll talk about patriarchal power structures and the plight of working mothers.)

[Read: The secret life of grief]

After my separation from my husband, when Maddy was starting her last year of boarding school, where she’d become a master at the pottery wheel, and Jacob was starting his first year of college—my son was born on May 28th, making him one of the youngest in his class; Maddy was born on July 14th, making her one of the oldest in hers—Suzi and I met for lunch at Whole Foods, and she held me as I disintegrated into pieces. “How do I even do this?” I sobbed.

“One step at a time,” she said.

I was reminded of the time Maddy and Jacob were both turning 3, or maybe it was their fourth birthday, who knows, but what I do recall is that we took the kids to the Central Park Zoo to celebrate. As we meandered our way there, the way Olmsted intended, Maddy insisted on climbing every rock along the way. Jacob stood a safe distance below, delighting in Maddy’s courage but firmly grounded by his lack of it.

“Come up! Climb with me, Jacob!” she said. When he did not budge, she climbed back down and said, “It’s not scary. I promise. Here, I’ll help you.” She grabbed his hand and led him up, one step at a time, to the top of a tall rock, showing him the beauty of life’s vista from her fearless vantage point. Maddy was that kid. The kid who drank up the world on her own terms. The kid with the unusually mature inner calm and a constant smile, as if she understood the absurdity of it all from toddlerhood on. The kid who was never on time, because why rush life when you can stop and not only smell the roses but feel the softness of their petals against your skin and then turn them into an ephemeral art project? The kid who refused to wear a coat in the winter not because she was stubborn but because she liked the feeling of cold air on her skin.

Suzi and Franklin, to their credit, never forced her to be anyone she wasn’t. They knew if she got cold enough, she’d put on a coat. That if they insisted she be on time, she would never have time to notice everything and then translate that into solid form.

Jacob recently ran into her at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) while visiting a friend. “We had such a nice time,” he said. “She’s so cool.” Maddy was studying painting, having turned her love of pottery into a mixed-medium form of two-dimensional representation. I guess you’d call it 2-D 3-D, since she used a 3-D printer to create tiny images on tiles of, say, Halloween scenes or faces, which she would then mix in with more abstract tiles and turn them into mosaics. In other words, Maddy was still being Maddy, unable to pin down with even the normal nomenclature of art.

This past September, she fell in love. She and her girlfriend insisted that both of their families have Thanksgiving dinner together, which they did, to the delight of all present. Maddy was finishing up her thesis, but the two had decided that she would stay at RISD for another year and a half so they could live together while her girlfriend, still a junior, finished up.

When I spoke to Suzi on the morning of December 14th, a few days after Maddy had finished her senior thesis, the organ harvesters had just arrived. The previous night, Maddy and her girlfriend had been driving from New York to Bennington to help Franklin pick up Alex from college. Franklin had been in the car ahead. At some point he realized that he no longer saw his daughter’s car behind him, and, growing concerned, he turned around. He found Maddy trapped in the driver’s seat. He held her in his arms, alive but unconscious, until the ambulance arrived. Her wheels had slipped on a patch of ice, sending her car into an oncoming truck. Her girlfriend walked away bruised but otherwise physically unscathed. Maddy died at the hospital on the operating table a few hours later.

[Read: The first holiday without a loved one]

“I’m going to need help getting through this,” Suzi said to me. I told her I’d be there as fast as I could. We’d take it one step at a time. Three hours later, I walked into their house in Hillsdale, New York. The first person I saw was Selma, Suzi’s mother, her head hung unusually low. “It’s unreal,” she said. “Unnatural.” I agreed. The fabric of the universe is irreversibly torn when a granddaughter leaves this earth before her grandmother. Franklin was slumped on a couch in the living room, staring out at the four empty chairs on the patio and to the mountains beyond. Everything in me wanted to run outside and remove one of the chairs from view, as if carting off a physical metaphor for their loss could ever ease the forever pain of it.

Our friend Helen walked in, crying, followed by Suzi and Alex, who’d been on a hike after arriving home from the hospital. I hugged Suzi, who, still in shock, spoke of the eerie calmness in the hospital room the night prior, as if Maddy were still there, sprinkling her never-in-a-rush essence over them. “I’ve always joked,” she said, “that the only time Maddy was ever on time was her due date. Now, for the first time, she’s early.” Alex hugged a family friend and wailed, a long, guttural moan of such pain and endurance that it will haunt all of us who heard it for years to come.

Selma, with all of her aged wisdom, kept looking for some meaning to make sense of it. “It must have been bashert,” she said, using the Yiddish word for destiny. As if it were God’s plan to take Maddy from us too soon. “I can’t believe that,” I said, having long ago decided that life is random chaos and pain, from which beauty must be sought out and appreciated every day to make it less so.

The last time I saw Maddy was this past July, when I was seated across from her at a large and lively dinner around her family’s table. Between the main course and dessert, my WeCroak app dinged, as it does every day, five times a day, with a friendly, “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.” The app was created out of a Bhutanese maxim, which asserts that contemplating death five times a day brings happiness. I downloaded it onto my phone after a near-death experience the previous summer. Maddy laughed when I explained all of this to her. “I don’t need an app to remind myself I’m going to die,” she said. “I’m aware of it every second.” She’d also made her peace with it, she said. She recently told her family that she had a premonition she would die young. She wanted them to understand that she was not scared of this, should it come to pass. “Tell Jacob I said hi,” she said, as she got in her car that night. “We had a really nice talk recently.”

“I heard,” I said. “I’ll tell him.”

Jacob and I stopped for lunch at a diner on the way to Maddy’s funeral, where a hawk would stream across the sky, in full view of the mourners, at the moment the rabbi read a prayer about flight. My son told me about Heidegger’s views on death and the importance of understanding nonexistence as an integral part of existence, and in that moment, taking a bite of my food and a sip of water, which is what living people must do to keep going, I had two radically conflicting, albeit Heideggerian, thoughts: I’m enjoying this moment of conversation and sustenance with my grown child so much, and I feel guilty for enjoying this moment of conversation and sustenance with my grown child so much.

The other mothers from our playgroup were at the funeral as well, all of us with the same guilty thoughts: Why did we still have our children when Suzi did not? It felt wrong, obscene. “It’s incomprehensible,” we kept saying to one another, for lack of better words. Roberta, of course, was there as well. I hadn’t seen her in years, as she moved away long ago, but we clung to each other and sobbed. “Thank you,” I belatedly said, “for introducing me to Suzi.” Had she never done so, I would have missed out on 23 years of having the privilege of knowing Maddy Parrasch.

Maddy’s ashes, true to her corporeal form, were late to arrive, so we didn’t get to scatter them at the funeral. I went back up to Hillsdale three days later, on Suzi’s birthday, to help her try to celebrate amidst her grief. While Franklin prepared his wife’s birthday feast—as great an act of love as I’ve ever witnessed—Suzi, Alex, a family friend, and I embarked on an hour-long hike up a Berkshire mountain, arriving at the top exactly a week after Maddy’s death. We hadn’t planned on this coincidence of timing. In fact, we were a few hours late getting started and worried about it growing dark during our descent, but we were determined to get Suzi out of the house and into nature. Knowing Maddy and her love of Central Park rock climbing and vista gazing, knowing her acceptance of her own mortality, even at 23, she would have loved (we decided for her in absentia, standing there at the summit) the synchronicity of celebrating her mother’s birth and her last breath at the top of a mountain named Monument.

“L’chaim,” Suzi said, blowing out her candles later that night—to life. Because what other choice do we humans, still with breath, have? We can’t go on. We must go on. We can’t process the death of a child. We must speak of it anyway.

from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2Th9u9Z

The Girl Who Lived

There were the scissors that my grandmother somehow remembered to bring with her as she fled. She could hear the rumble of destruction in the distance. She could see the cloud of smoke that was the Nazi murder of her family and neighbors. Without forethought, she made the decision to run ahead, carrying with her the scissors and, despite the blossoms of spring, a winter coat.

In the seasons that followed, which piled into years, she kept on walking, from Poland to Uzbekistan, and then back again. Although she was a teenager, her body could barely sustain the 2,600-mile trek. Her legs would swell, and sores covered her trunk. She nourished herself with stolen potatoes, expertly hidden in the lining of her dress. When she came into the occasional possession of grains of rice, she saved them as if they were precious metals.  

For decades, she said nothing about her escape. Then she gathered the courage to recite the story to her grandchildren, and she found that it fortified her against her nightmares. Narrating her life provided a sense of meaning to the improbability and pain of survival.

By the time I reached fifth grade, the scissors and the coat had become the foundational tale of my family’s existence. The small Jewish woman who turned her basement into a well-stocked bunker filled with enough bags of flour and boxes of Rice Krispies to withstand the next catastrophe emerged as our superhero. Her life was a testament to cunning, courage, and contingency. When I think about the scissors and the coat, it’s hard not to also think of the mountain of worn shoes at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, or the television clip that pauses to show the eyes of the child migrant. It’s hard not to think about the bare margin that separates survival from death, the decision made in a flicker that accounts for existence.

[Read: A son’s quest to find the man who saved his parents’ lives during World War II]

Her life connected ours to tragedy and history. I have piles of cassettes, compiled while sitting with her as she recounted her biography at her faux-marble kitchen table, sipping instant coffee from a red mug. She died 10 days ago. Now we no longer have her witness—in a time when Jews are slaughtered in Pittsburgh, when anti-Semites have regained power in the old blood-lands of Europe. My grandmother has become a memory, at a moment when the memory of the destruction of Jewry seems too faint to restrain the return of animal hatreds.

But right now, history feels small in comparison to the example she provided of how to suffer and to love. For some reason, I have in my head the story of what happened when, as an 8-year-old, I shattered a window with an errant throw of a rubber baseball. My expectations for punishment and sense of shame sent me into my bedroom closet, where I covered myself in clothes and cried. When she called my name, however, I came running. I couldn’t help myself. Hers was the voice of worry. Instead of chastisement, she showered me with the joy of reunion.  

Whenever I entered her home or she came to stay with me, I felt almost overwhelmed by the force of her love. Nobody has taken more joy from my mere existence, nobody has hugged me harder or kissed my cheeks with greater suction. It’s easy enough to describe life as a “blessing,” but with her I felt that highest sense of worth. I never asked her pointedly, How could a woman who survived such horrors remain such a bottomless font of warmheartedness?

Our superhero came from another planet. Her accented English wasn’t an immigrant’s incomplete understanding of an adopted language. Somehow her language was richer, because she possessed an easy mastery of slang. When a granddaughter showed spunk, she would delight, “Oh boy, she is pistol.” Remarking on her height, she would say, “I’m a shrimp”—the comparison of herself to trayfe, which she never touched, was just funny. Even her malapropisms felt better than the idiom she intended. When we would go to Roy Rogers, she would insist that we order a side of the “french friers.” (To experience true joy was to go with her to the buffet in the strip mall and to know that you were encouraged to abandon all sense of human limitation in the face of such a miracle.)

Her instinct to live was an expression of the instinct to survive. Her presence was so full of life, and not just the way she whirled around her house, accomplishing tasks, making to-do lists and finishing them, filling used coffee tins with spare change that had been separated by the year of issuance, organizing immense piles of coupons for shopping trips that became gratis.

As a teenager, she was a communist, an act of rebellion in a small conservative shtetl. I imagine the intensity of her yearning for a better world, the romanticism that would lead her to dream like that. It was this rebellion, her sense that the Nazis might seek her out for special punishment, that prodded her to flee. Her story of survival was bound together with her capacity for free thinking and her ability to feel deeply.

Survival, in the end, feels like an insufficient word to explain her existence. To survive is to keep on breathing. But her talent was to relish a bag of Hershey Kisses, to place phone calls to distant cousins (albeit in a very loud voice and truncated to save on long distance), to suck the emotional marrow from a grandchild’s graduation, to clap her hands as she played with a baby, to loudly sing a prayer in synagogue two words ahead of the congregation. To be a survivor is to emphasize toughness. Her essence was sweetness. While her body withered and broke down, she distilled into this true self. She lay in bed, without ever remarking on her condition. She expressed gratitude for every sip of water and every stroke of her hair. Even as she died, she provided a master class in how to live.

from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2SqbsoD

Democrats Establish a New House ‘Climate Crisis’ Committee

It’s official: When Democrats take control of the House of Representatives next month, they will form a special new committee to examine climate change, Nancy Pelosi said in a statement on Friday.

Pelosi, likely the next speaker of the House, also announced that the new committee will be named the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. It will be led by Kathy Castor, a seven-term representative from Tampa Bay.

“The American people have demanded action to combat the climate crisis, which threatens our public health, our economy, our national security and the whole of God’s creation,” Pelosi said in the statement. “Congresswoman Castor is a proven champion for public health and green infrastructure, who deeply understands the scope and seriousness of this threat.”

Castor, a longtime member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, has already promised to decline all campaign contributions from coal, oil, or gas companies. Pelosi has not yet described exactly what the committee will do, but House committees of this type can hold hearings, write reports, and bring public attention to political issues.

With its formation, Pelosi makes good on her 2018 campaign promise to revive a special climate-focused committee. (After Republicans took control of the House in 2010, they shuttered the last special climate committee, which Pelosi established in 2007.) But the new committee arrives to a delicate family situation in the Democratic Party. A number of activists on the party’s left have greeted the announcement with frustration. They had hoped (and protested) for a more ambitious Green New Deal committee. Such a panel, they imagined, might finally draft a unified Democratic climate policy, a plan to improve the lot of American workers while massively overhauling the economy to prepare for climate change.

[Read: The Democratic Party wants to make climate policy exciting]

“It’s a big disappointment,” says Stephen O’Hanlon, a spokesman for the Sunrise Movement, a Millennial-led organization that championed the Green New Deal plan. “The select committee on a Green New Deal was put together based on a hard look at what the science demands, and we were hopeful that Nancy Pelosi—who says she wants to take serious action on climate change—would be willing to come to the table for it.”

“We’ll have to see what the actual mandate of the committee is,” he adds.

The Climate Crisis Committee seems likely to get a much narrower mandate than activists envisioned for a Green New Deal committee. It will probably not be allowed to issue subpoenas, as a permanent standing House committee can, nor will it be able to draft legislation. Overall, it will be less powerful than the last House select climate committee, which had subpoena power but not legislative authority.

Castor had been rumored to be Pelosi’s pick to lead the committee since last week. She gets high marks from the League of Conservation Voters, indicating a solid environmental record.

But in the past week, she has sometimes seemed ignorant of major disputes among climate activists. For instance, the Sunrise Movement initially sought to ban Green New Deal committee members from receiving donations of any kind from the fossil-fuel industry. When Castor heard that demand, she balked, claiming that the First Amendment made it impossible. Though she later walked back that comment, calling it “inartful”—and promised to forswear fossil-fuel donations herself—the episode suggested that she is unfamiliar with a constituency she will now have to entertain.

The demand should not have come as a shock: Fossil-fuel money has been a touchy subject for Democrats for years. As recently as August, climate activists warred with party moderates over whether it was appropriate to ban fossil-fuel donations for all Democrats, not just those on a climate-focused panel.

[Read: Democrats are shockingly unprepared to fight climate change]

It’s not yet clear whether Castor will impose such a ban on all members of the Climate Crisis Committee. Her office did not respond to a request for comment.

The most interesting aspect of today’s news may be the new committee’s name. Al Gore used the phrase climate crisis often, and even Hillary Clinton sometimes deployed it during the 2016 election. It feels tedious to unfurl its message—Democrats believe climate change is an emergency, obviously—but perhaps the name is a reminder of how much energy politics have changed in the last decade. In 2007, when Democrats last established a select committee on climate change, they chose a name much more fitting for an era of high oil prices: The House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Now, the United States is just a few years off from exporting more energy than it imports. Thanks to fracking and renewable energy, we’ve solved the problem of American “energy independence.” Global warming, meanwhile, continues to get worse.

from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2BINLRd